February 1, 1983
In a recent speech, the head of the main government workers union in the United States accused the Reagan administration of "bleeding" the nation in order to finance defense spending and tax breaks for the rich. It is now clear that one cherished national social institution which is scheduled by the Reagan crowd for a major blood-letting is the Social Security System.
February 1, 1983
Jacob Morris has effectively exposed the attack on Social Security for what it is, and he has done this within the framework of the existing system. The underlying assumption is that Social Security must be paid for out of an accounting reserve supported by payroll taxes. Based on this premise, generally accepted by liberals and conservatives alike, the financial integrity of the reserve is taken as equivalent to the integrity of Social Security itself. But the real questions are different. Why use an accounting reserve and why apply the test of financial integrity? No such tests are applied to any other part of the federal budget, surely not to the enormous armaments expenditures. Basically, what is at issue here is not a financial but a social problem.
December 1, 1967
This talk by Issac Deutscher was originally published in Monthly Review on December 1967 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Karl Marx’s Capital. We are making it available here on the occasions of the 150th anniversary of Capital. In the original editors’ note to this article, 50 years ago Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy wrote: “This is the text of a talk given last summer on the BOO's Third Programme. It is reproduced here by permission. Isaac Deutscher is the author of distinguished biographies of Stalin and Trotsky, and at the time of his death at the age of 60 last August he was working on a biography of Lenin.” —The Editors
September 1, 1961
The questions below were submitted, in writing, to Comandante Guevara by during the week of the invasion; the answers were received the end of June.
May 1, 1961
What is an intellectual? The most obvious answer would seem to be: a person working with his intellect, relying for his livelihood (or if he need not worry about such things, for the gratification of his interests) on his brain rather than on his brawn. Yet simple and straightforward as it is, this definition would be generally considered to be quite inadequate. Fitting everyone who is not engaged in physical labor, it clearly does not jibe with the common understanding of the term "intellectual."… in the public consciousness there exists a different notion encompassing a certain category of people who constitute a narrower stratum than those "working with their brains." This is not merely a terminological quibble. The existence of these two different concepts rather reflects an actual social condition, the understanding of which can take us a long way towards a better appreciation of the place and the function of the intellectual in society.
February 20, 1954
Gerald Horne, author of The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America and, most recently, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, talks with Brian Griffin, host of People’s Republic about 17th century colonial history.
February 20, 1918
In mid-April, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carried out a six-day operation in the New York metropolitan area, detaining a total of 225 people. ¶ One month later, a young US citizen named Augustina stood in Manhattan’s Foley Square, a few hundred feet from ICE’s regional headquarters, and told a crowd of journalists and supporters how the series of raids—code-named ‘Operation Keep Safe’—had impacted her and her family....
February 20, 1909
What if more education doesn’t lead to more highly paid, skilled jobs? Gerald Coles, educational psychologist and author of Miseducating for the Global Economy, talks with Sasha Lilley of Against the Grain (94.1 KPFA) about our twenty-first-century global economy—and what corporations are doing to prevent our learning about it.
February 20, 1787
The days of boom and bubble are over, and the time has come to understand the long-term economic reality. Although the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, hopes for a new phase of rapid economic expansion were quickly dashed. Instead, growth has been slow, unemployment has remained high, wages and benefits have seen little improvement, poverty has increased, and the trend toward more inequality of incomes and wealth has continued. It appears that the Great Recession has given way to a period of long-term anemic growth, which Foster and McChesney aptly term the Great Stagnation.
February 20, 1729
Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis
384 pp, $28 pbk, ISBN 9781583675779
By John Smith
Reviewed by J. Z. Garrod in Science and Society, pp 148-51, vol. 82, no. 1, January 2018
